It's Been a Rough Week. More Are Coming.

Thoughts on the arrival of a new Administration

If you were paying attention (and I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t), last week was a hard week. It wasn’t just the ongoing stories about the fires in Los Angeles that made me feel like the world was starting to burn. It felt like this was just the beginning of the end of so many things I cherish.

Mark Zuckerburg’s inane remarks about how we need more “masculine” energy at work. The steady drum of shrugs regarding the gross incompetence and despicable behavior of Pete Hegseth. Parades of criminals making their way to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. Journalists resigning from the Washington Post, the publication that once proclaimed that Democracy Dies in Darkness, because the paper is now more interested in “riveting storytelling.” Joe Biden’s warning of the dangers of oligarchy. An inauguration flanked by billionaires ensuring their place in line.

So while there were several things more directly relevant to women lawyers I could have written about this week, it didn’t seem right to have an issue coming out on January 21st that didn’t address this moment. As the week we just experienced showed us, the arrival of a new president in the U.S.—particularly this president—will have profound changes for women lawyers, whether we think it will or not.

In this week’s issue of Comes Now, let’s talk about what this week told us about what’s coming and why each of the things I described above has something to do with the issues that women lawyers face.

“Setting Records” for Representation in the Legal Profession

Let’s start with where we are. As Law360 reported [paywall] this week, the National Association for Law Placement recently released its annual Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms. While Law360 celebrated that “women, people of color and women of color keep setting records for representation in the nation’s legal industry,” readers of this newsletter know to read beyond the headlines. In short, 2024 was another year of “incremental growth,” and, when we’re talking about “incremental growth,” that means there hasn’t been the transformational growth we need to truly effect change. As the first sentence of the NALP’s Report observes: “Although women, people of color, and LGBTQ lawyers reached new record levels of representation among lawyers in U.S. law firms in 2024, this year’s data show warning signs that some of this progress may be stunted in the years ahead, especially for Black or African American lawyers.”

Especially for Black lawyers indeed. The NALP report shows that while the numbers for women aren’t great—only 28.8% of partners are women—the numbers for people of color are downright abysmal. Only 12.7% of partners were people of color and only 5.3% of partners were women of color.

White men also continue to be disproportionately represented in the equity partner ranks. In 2024, 24.8% of equity partners were women and just 10.2% of equity partners were people of color. Non-equity partners were somewhat more diverse as compared to equity partners and partners overall — 34.3% were women and 15.2% were people of color.

As the NALP rightfully concluded:

Over the period that NALP has been reporting these data, the gains for women and partners of color have been minimal at best. In 1991, people of color accounted for 2.14% of partners and women accounted for 10.84% of partners. Thirty-three years later, these figures have only improved by approximately 11 and 18 percentage points, respectively. . . .

As is the case with associates, most of the increase in representation of partners of color since 2009 can be attributed to an increase in the number of Asian and Latinx partners, particularly Asian and Latino men. Representation of Black or African American partners has increased by just 0.9 percentage point during this time, and only surpassed the 2% threshold in 2020.

NALP Report, pp. 8-9.

In short, by virtually every metric, the top of the legal profession remains dominated by white men. If we assume linear progress, it will still be more than twenty years before white women see “equity” at the top of private law firms and, as the NALP was quoted as saying, it will take nearly twenty-seven years for representation of partners of color to reach parity with that of associates of color today. It will take far longer for women of color to reach either of these measures.

What Does Recent News Have to Do with It?

I mentioned above that we will only “achieve” just plain-old equity “if we assume linear progress.” But we have every reason to believe that we won’t see such linear progress in the years to come.

In order to improve the numbers of women and people of color who are partners or equity partners we can’t just focus on improving the numbers the NALP reports: we must change the practices that lead to those numbers. And in order to change those practices we need to value the things that such practices promote.

Values—-> Practices —→ Numbers (Equity)

But, if we didn’t know it already, it became pretty obvious this week that we don’t value the things that would lead us to implement practices that contribute to greater equity—at the top of the legal profession or within society at large.

After all, it’s not just that we need a society that values gender equity. At its core, a society that values gender equity must also values elevating all people—whether they look or love like we do, championing free competition that gives small businesses within our communities a chance, and allowing people to earn fair wages rather than growing the vast expanse between the rich and the poor. But instead of pursuing these values we have cheered on the richest and most entitled as they announced their intention to seek revenge against the systems that have “oppressed” them by seeking to elevate women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other historically disadvantaged groups.

So yes, while we talk a lot in this newsletter about the practices that can contribute to gender equity in the workplace, today I find myself weary of talking about those practices. Because none of them will change anything until and unless we change things far more fundamental.

In today’s society at least, when we value money and power over everything else, we end up elevating white men over everyone else. Indeed, this is the conclusion recently reached by Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, in contemplating the magazine’s coverage generally as well as, more specifically, its recent issue about who controls the world’s wealth:

[W]e noticed something, as we flicked through the drafts and infographics. Wherever in the work we’d sent a reporter, whichever corner of the technology landscape we were covering, the holders of all that money? Men. All of them. Every. Single. One. Bill Gates, who sat down with Steven Levy to talk about his new memoir (stay tuned), has enjoyed 29 of the last 30 years atop the list of the world’s richest people. Of the 30-odd crypto investors in Trump’s inner circle, all of them are—wait for it—guys. Even the young people hustling door-to-door in the Sunshine State, shilling solar panels in a desperate bid to become billionaires by 30, are, well, men.

. . . 87 percent of billionaires around the world are men, and women continue to be vastly, outrageously outranked in executive positions within the tech industry. None of that even begins to account for racial diversity, which paints an even bleaker picture. And it’s one likely to continue apace, as tech giants like Meta and Google chip away at their DEI investments. Meanwhile, the online manosphere—newly emboldened by President Trump and his First Buddy Musk—continues to metastasize in scope and influence.

But I’ll take ownership too. At WIRED, it’s our failure of editorial foresight and imagination to have seen the obvious—the blatant, persistent masculinity, page after page—only at the last minute. To not have, earlier in our assigning process, decided to interrogate the fraught and fractured gender dynamics of wealth accumulation, of corporate influence, of power. All of which still, infuriatingly, belong nearly exclusively to people with penises, with boardroom-commanding baritones, and with a centuries-long head start.

Uh, yeah.

But it’s not just the failure to see masculinity itself, is it? It’s the failure to see the concentration of power in white men and what that means about our economy and our culture. In that sense gender equity has both everything to do with gender and nothing at all.

Drummond concludes by saying: “It might be a rich man’s world for now, but trust me, women like money too. And we’re coming to take some of yours.” While that sounds like a girl power anthem, even if women acquire money and power, doing that won’t be nearly enough. To quote Coretta Scott King: “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”

Because we aren’t getting gender equity until our society achieves many other things first.

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